A Thread about the film JFK

He was paraphrasing a line from the movie, dude.

So JFK

if it’s a suicide, i’ve seen weirder

oh man why dont you fuckin stop it?!

He was paraphrasing a line from the movie, dude.

― Precious, Grace, Hill & Beard LTD. (C. Grisso/McCain), Wednesday, 27 April 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Aimless indeed.

how's your mousse

The fuckin' posters don't even know! Don't you get it?

all I wanted in the world was to be a catlick priest

I have my doubts about this picture, boss...

Boss, maybe you're bein' too hahd on Aimless.

You are one stubborn sonuvabitch.

The cool kids table has met.

That is precisely the point of a long dining table. The splendor of the meal adds to the enjoyment of it.

I hope you like squab!

Aimless, JD, Eric H., The Mafia, keeps 'em guessing like some kind of parlor game, prevents 'em from asking the most important question: why? Why was King Boy Pato banned? Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it up? Who?

I played JFK Reloaded a bunch of times when it was released and my conclusion was - most of the people posting in this thread could have made the shot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5U5iu85oUM

hey man i wasnt even IN dallas that day

Grassy knoll creeps

http://www.quartzcity.net/ilx/steelydan-grassyknoll.jpg

if yr not allergic to podcasts or to john ganz and his delivery and inablity to finish sentences lol here's the bouie/ganz "unclear and present danger" pod on jfk and the politics of its moment: https://open.spotify.com/episode/57rDv0n23lnQ5xZIob9wLr?si=0b23ffdca8a34fb0

i like ganz tho i get why some dont lol (he trolls a lot and he's irritably dismissive of ppl he thinks are idiots, some of whom probably aren't) and i like him partly bcz you can read him or on the podcast hear him thinking thru an idea that's just struck him in real time: here he gets a bit fixated on JFK being pernicious bcz (he claims) it mainstreamed a kind of conspiracy-centred mindset which he (correctly) thinks is bad for historical analysis and (also correctly) is inherently bad politics… where i think he overtstates the case is that this kind of thinking is always always always already a pretty constant pretty mainstream in american culture:
eg https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/illuminating-conspiracy

stone gets it mainly from the 60s counterculture of course, where it did exhibit some anti-war characteristics (important to his own personal psychodramas) -- this is primarily where the notion that it's a leftwing kneejerk comes from i suppose. QAnon is also marinated in 60s counterculture (and JFK-worship lol); it has curdled as it aged (and as difft wings of boomerdom learn to live with and exchange sensibilities that once clashed)

it occurs to me that cockburn's hostility to conspirary as a mode of analysis upthread at least partly reflects his (cockburn's) battles within the 70s counterculture to establish a politics less inclined to veer off towards reaction -- not that he didn't end up pushing bad CTs of his own in the end (e.g. he became a bit of a climate change truther iirc)

Ganz speedrunning a conversion to historical materialism as he worked his way through marxists.org was thrilling ngl

I will listen to that podcast, here he is on the Wes Anderson tweet (I haven't watched that film)

i didn't think the french dispatch was that good but i dunno about all that stuff about the fascioid carceral state and so on

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) May 1, 2022

yes he wrote a pissy review of it, i think for gawker

lol this film is so bad (i tried to rewatch it)

the truth is on your side, bubba!

I say "let justice be done, though the heavens fall"!

also i for the record: this is the only Stone movie i still truly, genuinely, enjoy & rewatch regularly

otm

you’re close. you’re closer than you think.

I still enjoy Keith David's soliloquy from "Platoon."

yeah there are things ~about~ Stone’s movies I still dig, the David speech, or Kilmer as Jim Morrison, or Juliette Lewis singing in the jail cell Natural Born killers … but i dont enjoy rewatching his other movies really at all because his DO YOU SEE tone always drowns out anything else that you might enjoy (imo)

JFK is the only movie that is actually served by, and is better because of his bombasity(?)

Isn't that do-you-see? tone pretty much embedded into every last line of Kevin Costner's? (Or at least him verbalizing his every thought as he tries to figure stuff out, which amounts to the same thing in the end.)

Dis is a coup d'etat. With Lyndon Johnson. WAITING. IN. DA. WINGS.

xpost yes! that’s what I mean! in JFK the “do you see” tone ~works~

a sensible take would be boring. you NEED the gesticulating-wildly, spittle-mouth red-faced craziness. that is part of the, for me, uh “charm” of this movie.

i dont usually like conspiracy stuff & i don’t think i even buy it with JFK that much

but at the same time, for me, with Kennedy there is just something about that world & the cast of characters & thd venn diagram of interested/wronged parties that i never tire of hearing about.

stone captures the wild parade of spooks & weirdos & i love love love it

i dunno

the wild parade of spooks & weirdos--agree that that's the best thing about the film, by far. Unfortunately--for me, anyway; I know I've made this point before on this thread--Costner stops the film cold every time he opens his mouth.

I don't know if don't-you-see is all over Nixon, which I love. I can think of at least one flagrant instance, when the Larry Hagman character is trying to get Nixon to run in '64; Nixon says no one can beat Kennedy, then some guy in the shadows says "But what if Kennedy doesn't run," and everybody exchanges knowing glances.

hoover watching w cruel satisfaction as leading racehorse unexpectedly collapses

dammit who cooked this steak there’s blood all over my plate

i know what hunt is; i know what he… TRACKS back TO (i actually like this a lot)

it’s the system!

Also the scene where Richard Helms's eyes literally turn black:

https://phildellio.tripod.com/cia.jpg

Yeah, I suppose do-you-see is all over Nixon too. But happily, no Kevin Costner.

Unfortunately--for me, anyway; I know I've made this point before on this thread--Costner stops the film cold every time he opens his mouth.

yeah but the sleaze would lose its thrill without true-hearted Ray Kinsella in the center of the film

As I recall it, even though he gave his usual performance on the level of a large lump of unrisen doug, and yet that doughy lump gave the film its vital center of gravity and a breath of sincerity it absolutely required.

"where i think he overtstates the case is that this kind of thinking is always always always already a pretty constant pretty mainstream in american culture:
eg https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/illuminating-conspiracy";

Heard this late last night and it was an odd experience because like, everyone knows it's terrible history that is a bunch of conspiracy nutso rants. I did laugh at the JFK historian talking about the length of the Donald Sutherland monologue (the centrepiece of the film, far more than the trial) because yes that is the point in the film you get to thinking it's a high grade entertaining piece of fluff (but also a good piece of film for Stone, I certainly wouldn't bother with anything else he's made) or you try and get more mileage out of the 'terrible with damaging consequences for the state of the nation' theory, which at the moment is based on conversations Ganz had with people he's met. I was struck by how the historian (Alexis, forget her name) or the host didn't really engage much with what Ganz was proposing, which isn't that different from the outrage you used to get at violent film, and how they could incite violent acts. And no one really believes that, bar conservatives.

But it is all chat and maybe when he puts meat on the bones it might read more convincingly.

ganz is working on a book abt politics and culture in the 90s and grumpily noted during the pod that he now realised he had to write a JFK chapter lol

to me the point is that there's a larger curdling of various reaches of 60s radicalism -- which stone is certainly adjacent to -- into the bed* of present-day reactionary thinking among boomers in the UK and the US and elsewhere. of course JFK isn't remotely a catalyst outside the US: so i'd want to look for something less parochial as the jumpstart (if it has to have a single jumpstart). i'd be happy maybe to argue that JFK allowed a latent but very widespread tendency towards conspiracy theory in the US political unconscious to manifest as a new kind of cultural coalition, and helped flavour the form it took as the curdling happen. conspiracy theory wasn't remotely and was never far off the mainstream, but maybe as the boomers came of age this is when their version of it (sparked by and against COINTELPRO and MK-ULTRA) began significantly to fuse with the far-right versions? i'd like to see that argument dug into more (ganz already has a model for it in what he calls the "sorelian left", the strand of the french far left at the turn of the century who moved *right* in the wake of the dreyfus affair and WW1: but i haven't really seen himn connect the dots in this specific area… )

rush to judgement was *huge* among 60s counterculture radicalism -- remember the first beatles LP to land in the US, beatlemania, was release just three days after JFK was shot --

*not a mixed metaphor, lots of things can curdle into a bed: cheese for example

lol ignore the beatles paragraph -- i have a theory abt that also (abt kennedy as the lost prince across the water and who the counterculture embraced as replacement daddy) but i meant to delete it as it is NOT WELL FORMED YET and a distraction in this context

I forget if J. Hoberman ever addressed JFK in any of his many published pieces on film + paranoia.

he and amy taubin never shut up abt the zapruder footage :)

i probably have the village voice review of JFK in a box somewhere but i don 't remember who the reviewer was (seems p likely it was JH but… )

"to me the point is that there's a larger curdling of various reaches of 60s radicalism -- which stone is certainly adjacent to -- into the bed* of present-day reactionary thinking among boomers in the UK and the US and elsewhere. of course JFK isn't remotely a catalyst outside the US: so i'd want to look for something less parochial as the jumpstart (if it has to have a single jumpstart)."

Yeah I think the podcast got me to see what a trauma this was for Americans. I know it was, but just hearing it hammers the point. As a film it's a truly surrealist jumble of these conspiracy theories ("at the most secret point") with...Cuban gay mafia(??!?!?!) Very glad the editing aspect was mentioned, because that's the heart of why this is worth a bother, and why Ganz needs to write a chapter on it (weirdly I don't think it's a big deal at all, but I'm an ocean away). Because it's good as film, it engages/enrages.

Was thinking that maybe Brexit is the nearest analogue. But I don't know, it doesn't have the true sudden shock of a whole nation mourning, as this was the result of a nation divided. Diana was seen as just off the heart of the establishment, though it has the conspiracy element. Maybe that's why I am really looking forward to the Queen's death so much.

it doesn't jumble anything like enough of the conspiracies!

(e.g. no george hickey and his hair-trigger AR-15 in the car behind for example, the funniest and therefore the only good theory imo -- hickey fell over backwards when the motorcade sped up after the first shots, his finger tightened involuntarily and he blew off JFK's head by mistake)

re the mourning: the US was also divided tho (as the movie clumsily shows, costner muttering " i hate this country" when some trolls hoot and holler with deliught in the bar. more interestingly maybe, the counterculture was also divided (at least if you stretch that term to include e.g. malcolm x saying the chickens had come home to roost)

luka/aimless: I think that point has been made on here too, that Costner's blandness is a necessary foil to all the craziness. I've compared him to the Martin Milner character in Sweet Smell of Success; Diane Keaton in the two Godfathers might be another parallel, especially the second, where she's seemingly there to explain stuff we've already figured out.

Would Godfather II be hurt by her absence? I don't think so--I think it'd be an even greater film with a less bland Kay.

ed asner shd have played garrison (on stilts perhaps since i believe garrison was a beanpole of a man): the milquetoast niceman persona we get is as exhausting after like five seconds as it's implausible (he's a new orleans district attorney ffs)

costner's first line -- when he's told kennedy's been shot -- is like "oh no" in just the weediest squeakiest way. of course some of the problem is that stone has zero sense of humour -- a garrison who was darkly funny abt all this absurd stuff (instead of a nerdily credulous exposition-robot) might have actually been an adequate foil

also more shd have been made of the jacques tati pipe-and-umbrella combo, it's right there and then it's just thrown away (in conclusion jacques tati shd have directed this film, being ten years dead is no bar to it being better than stone's film)

the milquetoast niceman persona we get is as exhausting after like five seconds as it's implausible (he's a new orleans district attorney ffs)

Yes. Remember "I took nine judges on, Deano, right here in New Orleans, and I beat 'em all!"?